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Dr. Terrie Wurzbacher

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One Day At A Time

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custom_dart_calendar_16634 “Always remember that the future comes one day at a time” ~Dean Acheson

It’s always interesting to me that something so simple and so true can be so elusive and difficult to embrace.

Why is it so hard for us to realize this? You hear all sorts of stories about unexpected events happening to people that totally change their lives forever and derail them from the direction they have been focusing on.

If we continue to live in the future without being happy and satisfied on a day to day basis, we may miss out on life as it goes flying by. Waiting for the future is a big mistake. This is not to say that you shouldn’t have goals or want to do something with your life that involves planning and working toward it. But, don’t wait until you’ve achieved it to start enjoying your life.

Don’t be thinking “when I lose weight, I’ll be happy”, or “when I get this other job, I’ll have enough money to do the things I want to do and like”. This type of thinking keeps you from living in the Now and actually enjoying your life, living it to the fullest. If you wake up every morning and tell yourself “I’m going to live life to the fullest today no matter what”, then you’ve set your intention and “paved your way” for the day.

So what does “living your life to the fullest” mean? Maybe you’re not at the weight you want or have the amount of money you want, or have the love of your life yet. But, you have your personality and the beauty of the outdoors and the moon and the sky and everything about nature. In addition, you have people around you that you can influence. You can smile at them, say ‘hi’, tell them they did a good job, be there for them. It doesn’t take money to do all that, you don’t have to be at a certain weight or in love to make the lives of others happy. It takes a moment, it takes desire and awareness and a few words and a smile. Can you do that? I venture to say that making a difference in the life of someone else would actually make you feel more fulfilled than the other things I mentioned (weight, money, love life, etc). Try it, I think you’ll like it.

When things aren’t going the way you want them to, you really should slow down and find out what it is you CAN do given your new circumstances. You’ve been derailed from the road you were comfortably marching down and all of a sudden you have to change gears. You all know how incapacitated I am right now. I can just now walk some (with my boot) but still with a lot of pain. So, I cannot do any of the activities I like or need to do (including cleaning up the place – I haven’t even finished putting things away from the run in July). What are my options? Well, I could sit around and mope and I’m actually pretty good at that. But, I also know that it simply wastes my time. I allow myself to mope for a maximum of 45 minutes, then I have to do something. I’ve been forced to come up with other alternatives for what to do. And I have.

I could sit and say “I can’t wait until I can run again” and then waste all the days in between. And, what if these injuries keep me from running again? Then what? I could say “why aren’t my feet getting any better? They are the same as yesterday – what’s going on? Why me? Why isn’t it better?” etc. But what good would that do? NONE at all. What is better is to find something productive to do and something that will make me happy. So I spend the weekend OFF of Facebook (where all the race comments will be for the races I couldn’t go to but had signed up for). That way I’m not constantly thinking about what I “wish” I were doing. I have already made a list of all the things I can do and will do the ones I have to and then the ones I want to. I’ve been “knocked off my feet” for some universal lesson and I might as well spend this long weekend “going to school” to see if I can determine what the lessons are.

Try to reform the pathways in your brain. Find out what your purpose is in life and proceed to create a new path. It might lead to the same destination but you might have to take a different road to get there. Create your own AAA and make your new “trip tickets” – you can map your way, load up your GPS  and head on down a new highway to get to that destination (your purpose in life).  It’s all how you look at where you are right now compared to where you want to go!

What can you do to live life to the fullest today? I know I am going to laugh and joke and let others around me know how much I appreciate them today! Tell me what you’re going to do?

Terrie

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Momentum Monday

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momentum-monday1

quote-119 How has this been a factor in your life? When have you been knocked down but gotten back up and continued to move on, to fight for what you believed in, for what you wanted in life?

When have you been knocked down and stayed down for the count? Have there been instances when you’ve just given up and just not bothered to get back up again? Perhaps you re-evaluated why you were fighting for that thing in the first place. Perhaps you realized that you really wanted to head in a different direction. Perhaps you just gave up. All of these are OK as long as you learned from the experience.

This is similar to the expression about never giving up – that the end might actually be just over the bend or the crest in the hill. We seem to want to give up when the going is toughest. After all, I wanted to quit the 314 mile Tennessee race with only 14 miles to go. That would qualify for quitting when the end is just around the corner so to speak. The difference there, though, was that I knew it was around the corner. Sometimes we just feel as if our tank is completely empty and we cannot go on no matter what. I was at that point for sure. Anyone who knows me knows that it is not like me to cry for 2 miles (or any miles for that matter) but that’s the point where I was. My tank didn’t even have any fumes left in it. This is one time where I would have been knocked down and NOT gotten up again. However, I had people around me that made me get back up (they just didn’t give me any other option). Because of these other people I was able to finish. They pulled me up by my bootstraps. But the point is, it doesn’t matter how you get back up, just that you do.

Surround yourself with people who will help you reach your success point – or even go higher than what you thought you could do. You may need to stop and take a rest but you should not allow yourself to stop forever. Some people may be down for years but they eventually get back on their horse and reach their goal. That is fine too. It has continued to spark a fire inside of them and eventually it got big enough to propel them back in that direction. Just don’t tell yourself that you’re down and out. Tell yourself that you’re just taking a rest perhaps.

Do NOT stay down. Humans were made to be in an upright position. Get up and keep moving! You can do it. You don’t really know what lies ahead of you and what greatness will be there for you to receive.

Terrie

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Embracing Change

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embracing change2“We cannot change anything until we embrace it” ~Carl Jung

This concept is so important. Remember “What you resist, persists”. So when you feel yourself fighting hard against something, just know that you’ll have that something in your life — and will also attract more of the same into that life. Do you want more of that?

In order to keep moving along in life though, things should change. Change means that you can grow and evolve. You don’t really want to stay in one place in your growth or you’ll miss out on a tremendous amount of fun and probably abundance too.

The military is a great place to learn to experience change. Unfortunately I didn’t really learn until last year how to embrace all those changes. I was the type to resist the changes. I would put all the energy I could muster into figuring out why that idea (that involved changing things) would NOT work, instead of raising my vibrations to focus on the solution and discover how the other person’s ideas could probably work if we all just put some work into it. What a tremendous amount of time and energy I wasted all my life. But I think the reason for my resistance was that the idea for change was not mine and so I felt inferior or something. It was hard for me to admit that another person could have an idea. I felt I was inferior if I didn’t have that idea. And since I didn’t want to feel inferior, I fought back – with resistance. How foolish and young of me. Of course I got better at accepting change as the 30 years in the Navy went by but I don’t know that I ever embraced it.

But last year, when the best boss I’ve ever had in my career arrived and I watched her with all of us, I truly did embrace the changes she made – and boy, were there a  lot of them. You know what, though? They were all good, if not great. I learned more from her than I have ever learned from any boss in all my years of working. And I think it was easier to learn those things because I finally did embrace the change. Every week I knew there would be something new and although that meant more work, I actually looked forward to those changes. I knew I would have to alter my outlook and attitude each week and that became a fun challenge. One I saw the great benefits from.

Ways to help you embrace change include anything that will help you relax such as meditation or EFT. Deep breathing is a part of meditation but can also be used separately if you don’t have time or experience to do full blown meditation. Once you’ve relaxed, you’re less likely to put up resistance. Keep this in mind and take some time when you find yourself resisting some change that’s coming into your life. I know that as we have another new boss whose style is totally different than last year’s, I will be doing a great deal of relaxation techniques to just allow the changes to happen and to welcome them into my life to see what gifts they bring even if they aren’t visible right now.

Do you embrace change? Do you resist change? What have you noticed when you’ve done either the embracing or the resisting?

Terrie

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Sometimes It’s The Smallest Decisions

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sometimes-its-the-little-decisions “Sometimes it’s the smallest decisions that can change your life forever” (Keri Russell)

Have you ever experienced this? It might take some time to recognize that there were little decisions in your life that changed its course, but I imagine that if you think about it long enough, you’ll see that it’s true.

One day when I was still in Virginia, I was working in DC and there was a snow storm starting. I asked my boss if I could leave early since I had a 60 mile drive. He said “no” because we were having some sort of class or lecture. I was not a happy camper. It took me 8 hours to get home that day because I-95 was closed due to a 100 car pile-up (yes, that is 100 cars). Was I upset? Not at all because I realized that had I left when I wanted to, I would have been right smack in the middle of the pile-up. That would not have been good. But it was a small decision by my boss that saved my day (and maybe saved even more than that).

Even funnier is that I chose to join the military to pay my tuition for medical school. That was not a small decision. But the reason I joined the Navy over the other services surely was a small decision. I liked the uniforms! Seriously, that’s the reason my friend and I picked the Navy. The recruiters didn’t tell us squat to help us make any other kind of decision. In fact, had they told us more, I would have joined the Army because then I could have gone to Viet Nam and done the work I wanted to. In the Navy I couldn’t do that because I was a woman.  However, I will tell you that joining the Navy was the best thing that ever happened to me. Even though I joined for two years and that’s really all I intended to stay for, 30 years later I was retiring with a really great career and life behind me. All because of the uniforms!

Go back through your life and examine the things that have happened to you. What led up to those events? Can you find some small decision that led you down that particular path?

As your life continues, do not demean the small decisions you are being asked to make. What seems small now may not be small in the long run.

Pay attention and investigate the past. It will be a fun exercise to do. We all need a bit of fun right?

Terrie

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Momentum Monday

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momentum-monday1“Don’t do anything that you don’t really want to do. Keep yourself in a place of feeling good. Reach for the thought that feels better — and watch what happens.” —Abraham [Excerpted from the workshop: Boston, MA on October 10, 1999]

Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do but is it that we don’t want to do them or we’d rather be doing something else? Either way, we really shouldn’t be doing something that we really despise. That will bring us down and our vibration down.

If you find yourself in a position where things aren’t feeling the best, try to reach deep to find something about the situation that you can hold onto that would make you feel better. That’s “reaching for a better feeling thought.” It might even be something simple like “I’m so glad I have a home and a great family” or even “I love my dog. I’m so lucky.” Let me give you an example. Right now is the first time in 5 years that I haven’t been able to do any form of exercise for several weeks. At times, it starts to get to me and I start to imagine and worry about how “out of shape” I’m getting and how lucky everyone else is that I see running along my street. But then I slap myself and say “stop it. You are healthy and you can use this time to exercise your mind and allow your body to regenerate, Terrie.” I then stop and realize that there are always life lessons in everything that happens to me (and to everyone for that matter) and it’s my responsibility to identify what those lessons are and do something productive with them. When I move to that type of thinking, I actually get excited thinking about it. My vibration moves from really down (with the potential for spiraling further and further down that rabbit hole) to an upward momentum of excitement and curiosity.

You can do this with any situation you’re in. Stop and assess where you are and maybe where you could be if you allow yourself to continue that line of thinking. Do you want to continue to go in that direction? If not, then find something, anything that can help you feel different. It may not be a massive upward swing in your attitude but as long as it’s an improvement and a “better feeling thought”, you’re on your way to changing your life for the better!

Terrie